by Heidi Green
November 30, 2007

Think back to your school days. Did you learn about breastfeeding? I didn’t. I’m not sure how the health teacher managed to talk about breasts without talking about their primary function—perhaps, “Breast development is a part of female puberty. End of discussion.” But she did.

And so it is with interest that I read an article by Hila J. Spear, RN, PhD, IBCLC, about college students’ recollection of their middle and high school breastfeeding education and their subsequent attitudes about breastfeeding.

Spear surveyed male and female students enrolled in any of three intro-level courses at Liberty University, a private university in Virginia. One of the classes was a general education course (“Contemporary Issues”), while the other two were nursing classes (“Medical Terminology,” “Introduction to Nursing”). Completion of the brief survey was completely voluntary.

About 86 percent of the nearly 600 students chose to participate; 515 surveys were collected. The majority of survey respondents (65 percent) were female. About 55 percent of respondents had attended public school, although nearly 11 percent had been home schooled for middle school and 8 percent for high school, too. The vast majority of respondents were Caucasian (78 percent), and most were freshman (71 percent). Nearly one-third (31 percent) were nursing majors.

Although about 10 percent were uncertain how they were fed as infants, about 49 percent reported having been breastfed and another 28 percent reported having been breast- and formula-fed. Only about 13 percent had received formula alone.

Only about 37 percent of the participants reported having been taught breastfeeding information in high school, and just about 11 percent said they were taught about it in middle school. Most (between 55–60 percent) reported that it was taught in their health and family life class.

Breastfeeding attitudes
The vast majority of respondents (87 percent) felt that breastfeeding should be included in high school; over one-third (35 percent) felt it should be included in the middle school curriculum. Nearly all (91 percent) agreed that it is important to promote a “breastfeeding-friendly culture.”

Many female students also said they planned to breastfeed (86 percent) and male students to encourage breastfeeding (86 percent). In fact, only 3-4 percent of respondents said they would not breastfeed or encourage breastfeeding.

In light of this, it seems surprising that over two-thirds (68 percent) indicated that public breastfeeding was “not acceptable,” and that even more (78 percent) said it was an “intimate act” that should take place “in private.”

College is generally accepted as being a time of heightened sexual awareness and powerful peer pressure. Breasts are sexual parts that should be kept under cover (although they may be flashed during a Girls Gone Wild moment). For this reason, I don’t think it is any surprise that so many college students felt that feeding from the breasts should be a private act. This is probably also why they felt it was an inappropriate topic for middle-school students.

I wish we could fast-forward about 10 or 15 years and conduct a follow-up survey with these same students. Their opinion about how “private,” “intimate” and, really, “isolated” breastfeeding should be may change once they and/or their friends have (and, hopefully do, breastfeed) their children. Their opinion about the topic’s appropriateness for middle-school students may change once they see their children “breastfeed” their baby dolls or hear them talk about how other mammals feed their babies.

The findings of this study are probably not representative of the broader community (all participants had gone on to education beyond high school) or even of all college/university students (nearly half were majoring in a health care field, students self-selected to participate in the study). Still, the results do highlight that there is a place for breastfeeding education in the standard school curriculum—or, at least, there should be.

As parents, let’s see what we can do to make sure that our children hear about the many health benefits of breastfeeding not only outside the classroom, but inside it, too.

Heidi Green has been researching and writing about women’s and children health since she moved to Pittsburgh more than 10 years ago. She is also a children’s book reviewer in her spare time. She is mom to Ben, Katie, Sam, and Max.